Python 3.8.0 is almost ready. After a rather tumultuous few days, we are very happy to announce the availability of the release candidate: https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-380rc1/ https://www.python.org/downloads/release/python-380rc1/ This release, 3.8.0rc1, is the final planned release preview. Assuming no critical problems are found prior to 2019-10-14, the scheduled release date for 3.8.0, no code changes are planned between this release candidate and the final release. Please keep in mind that this is not the gold release yet and as such its use is not recommended for production environments. Major new features of the 3.8 series, compared to 3.7 Some of the new major new features and changes in Python 3.8 are: PEP 572 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0572/, Assignment expressions PEP 570 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0570/, Positional-only arguments PEP 587 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0587/, Python Initialization Configuration (improved embedding) PEP 590 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0590/, Vectorcall: a fast calling protocol for CPython PEP 578 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0578, Runtime audit hooks PEP 574 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0574, Pickle protocol 5 with out-of-band data Typing-related: PEP 591 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0591 (Final qualifier), PEP 586 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0586 (Literal types), and PEP 589 https://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0589 (TypedDict) Parallel filesystem cache for compiled bytecode Debug builds share ABI as release builds f-strings support a handy = specifier for debugging continue is now legal in finally: blocks on Windows, the default asyncio event loop is now ProactorEventLoop on macOS, the spawn start method is now used by default in multiprocessing multiprocessing can now use shared memory segments to avoid pickling costs between processes typed_ast is merged back to CPython LOAD_GLOBAL is now 40% faster pickle now uses Protocol 4 by default, improving performance (Hey, fellow core developer, if a feature you find important is missing from this list, let Łukasz know mailto:lukasz@python.org.) Call to action: focus on the docs now Are all your changes properly documented? Did you notice other changes you know of to have insufficient documentation? Can you help with the “What’s New https://docs.python.org/3.8/whatsnew/3.8.html” document? - Ł